1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a print job conversion control for an information processing apparatus configured to perform conversion of a print job among plural printing systems having different functions.
2. Description of the Related Art
The commercial printing industries are based on a print-ordering system capable of receiving, from clients, print requests for various products (e.g., magazines, newspapers, catalogs, advertisements, and gravures), creating printed products requested by the clients, and delivering the printed products to respective clients.
This kind of commercial printing industries generally uses large-scale printing apparatuses, such as offset printing machines, to perform various processes including document entry, design and/or layout, comprehensive layout (print output for presentation), correction (layout correction and color correction), proof print, camera-ready block copy creation process, printing process, post-processing process, and delivery.
On the other hand, highly-advanced technologies of recent electrophotographic printing apparatuses and inkjet printing apparatuses can realize a print on demand (hereinafter, referred to as POD) market comparable to the printing service provided by the conventional printing industries.
The POD system is useful in processing a relatively small lot of job in a short period of time without using large-scale apparatuses and systems. The POD system can utilize best performances of digital image forming apparatuses, such as digital copying machines and digital multifunction peripherals, to obtain a digital print of electronic data, which cannot be realized by the above-described conventional printing system using large-scale printing machines or printing methods.
According to the POD system, management and control of printing processes can be greatly digitized and computerized compared to the conventional printing system.
Furthermore, the POD system can use a workflow including plural processing processes (e.g., pre-print process, print process, and post-print process) required for outputting a print result. The printing system can execute the print processing according to the workflow and can efficiently obtain a print result requested by a client (orderer).
A technique for automatically creating a workflow including plural processing process is, for example, discussed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2004-164570. According to a method for automatically creating a workflow discussed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2004-164570, a workflow creation apparatus holds environment information (e.g., output conditions including attribute values of a final output product, workflow creation rules stored beforehand, presence of processing modules, and designation of computers that can execute respective processing modules). Then, based on the environment information, the workflow creation apparatus automatically creates a workflow for obtaining a final output product.
However, according to the above-mentioned Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2004-164570, no consideration is given to print data created for a different printing system although the workflow required to obtain a final output product can be automatically created. As an example of print data, the print data may include portable document format data (PDF) (content data) and print instruction data (job ticket).
For example, creation of PDF for a system A is generally optimized by performing down-sampling suitable for the resolution of a printing device in the system A. Therefore, if a digital print section in a system B is different in resolution from a digital print section in the system A, the digital print section of the system B cannot execute optimum print processing for PDF transferred from the system A. Accordingly, if the PDF transferred from the system A is processed by the digital print section in the system B, the print quality will be deteriorated.
Furthermore, a printing device in the system A and a printing device in the system B may have different printable regions even if they can print the same regular size (A4/A3) documents. For example, a printing device in the system B may require a larger printing margin compared to that of a printing device in the system A. In such a case, if PDF created by a prepress section in the system A is processed by the printing device in the system B, the peripheral region of an image may not be printed properly due to the difference of printing margin.
As described above, various problems arise when print data created for a particular printing system is processed by another printing system. An output result requested by a client may not be obtained. It is, however, difficult and time consuming for a worker to carefully check function information of devices and print data processed in both systems and rearrange the print data to smoothly execute the print processing.